I have been searching for over a year to the solution to this problem.

Every time I open an Office 2007 Home and Student program, the Windows Installer pops up. It remains open, loading and “configuring” for 20-30 seconds before I can use my program (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and One Note). There are some other threads posted on this issue but no solution provided.

I purchased by Dell Studio 17 laptop in May 2009 and the windows installer running on start up of any Office 2007 program has been an issue from the very beginning. I work around it by using new shortcuts that I made (a suggestion from another forum) but the problem persists whenever I try to open a file that is already created. For example, a document from the internet that I want to view: the only way I can open it without the installer popping up is to download the file permanently to my downloads or desktop, open Word from my "special" shortcut, and then use the "Open" function, instead of just clicking the file. The shortcuts I made point to the same files that the Dell Dock originally did. Usually after people turn off the Dell Dock (within five minutes of getting the computer...), they realize they cannot open the program from the start menu (Start>All Programs>Microsoft Office) without running into the windows installer popping up. This is probably why Dell didn't notice the problem, too, because they probably just launched the programs from the Dock to make sure they worked - if they checked at all.

After much Googling, my conclusion is that for a certain period of time, laptops (probably just the Studios) made by Dell that had Office 2007 Home and Student installed were flawed in some way. Microsoft nor Dell seem to be offering a fix to the problem and whoever is responding by simply linking the "Windows Installer Cleanup Tool" needs to be told that the tool is no longer available from Microsoft (reasons are on the link).

Uninstalling and reinstalling the program doesn't work, which suggests it is a registry problem from the initial instillation of the software by Dell.

Another suggestion offered involved running a computer with a working Office 2007 and using ProcMon to compare which DLLs were running when the program was opened on each computer, because some DLLs are missing. This is an insanely complicated process for the average user and poking around in the registry files is a very annoying thing to have to do, though it might work.

The only suggestion that seems to actually work for people is to do a complete wipe and reinstall the system. This is not an acceptable fix!

There needs to be a fix offered for this problem. Dell needs to find which files were corrupted or missing in the registry from the initial instillation and put a patch out, because there are a lot of people suffering with this problem (just Google "Dell Office installer runs" and you'll see various threads in various places of people desperately searching for a fix).